THE KIND IF SCIENCE I REALLY LIKE. But what do I know?

Linda and her Mom, southern Michigan, 2001

She loved dry leaves, fall, and her family.

It has been over a week since I posted anything to this site and I know that most of you are worried and distressed, so I will tell you what is going on.  Then, I will slip in some thoughts on cancer research, and end by introducing you to somebody I wish I knew – Dr. Titia de Lange.

First, about me:  I have been in Borrego Springs since December 28^th; that is, for a little bit more than a week.  I have been out to dinner three times, worked daily on some stuff I am doing for the Marsha Rivkin Center for Ovarian Cancer Research, explored the desert three times with my new jeep (a joy!), and gone out with the Paleo Society on one field trip.  The latter experience was less than wonderful.  I was so lacking in energy (and also in pain pills) that I had to quit early, after only a few hours.  I am afraid that the Paleo people are worried about me, to the extent that they surreptitiously assign one of the members to follow me and make sure I don’t collapse and die in some remote dry gulch, to be found by future Paleo people many  decades hence and confidently identified as a tiny ground sloth.  At any rate, on this last trip there was one guy who never let me out of his sight.  Also, the leader kept radioing me to find out where I was.  It may be that my efforts are a net loss to paleontology but I don’t care; if I get back in shape it will be fun again.

Now some thought:.  If you are a faithful reader of these things you will know that from time to time I grumble about the empirical nature of the research I run across, which I characterize  (somewhat unfairly, I suspect) as “Who gives a damn WHY it work; if it does, run with it.” I fully appreciate that point of view.  However, I continue to suspect that the ultimate eradication of most,  perhaps all, cancers will require a very thorough understanding of their basic biology.  That’s why I was happy to read about the career of Dr. Titia de Lange.  She works on telomeres, and has done so for many years.

Why is it that, in NIH, NCI, Fred Hutch, etc., publications that contain pictures, the women scientists never look like they are more than 40 years old, whereas the men appear to be contemporaries of Darwin?  Anyway, Dr de Lange appears to be no older than our (WWU Geology) youngest women faculty, although she got her Ph.D. in 1981.  She is determined to ferret out the secrets of telomeres, by studying their basic biology.

You remember telomeres.  I wrote about them on July 12, 2012.  That blog bit stirred up a little excitement, in the form of a real live Dr., who wrote in to set me straight.  Anyway, telomeres are short, repeated, “non-coding” sequences of nucleotides found on the end of chromosomes.  Their purpose in somatic cells (all cells except germ – sex – cells) is to protect the chromosomes from damage during replication (that is, to keep them from losing their tails when the cell divides).  It seems that a bit of the end of these things is lost with every cell division.  In the cell’s youth the part lost is the otherwise-useless telomere.  When the telomeres are all used up the chromosome experiences real damage, and then the cell happily dies.  In germ cells (and other stem cell?) the telomeres are NOT used up, because of the good offices of an enzyme called telomerase.  Telomerase rebuilds the telomere chain as fast as it is used up, hence these stem cells don’t go into oblivion.  In a sense, they are immportal.  (Hence the name of the Henrietta Lacks book.)

But, it appears that cancer cells ALSO have telomerase.  Thus, they don’t curl up and die after a few divisions, but instead just keep multiplying.  Why in heck is telomerase found in a set of cells that ideally ought to croak?  How can evolution account for THAT?  Damned if I know.  (Joanne, if you know but can’t get the Comment machine to work, Dick will be happy to help.)  Anyway, this is the sort of problem that Dr. de Lange is devoting her life to solving.  When she answers that question  a broadly applicable therapy for cancer may be just around the corner.  Go, Dr. de Lange - you are my hero!